I can’t stop playing Marathon. I can’t stop thinking about Marathon. I’ve spent consecutive nights staying up way too late scanning data samples on Perimeter and dying in the Algae Ponds on Dire Marsh. I’m repeatedly dipping out in the middle of the day for a quick run or three. A notification for an invite pops on my phone and the next thing I know I’m firing up the PS5 when I should be doing a dozen other things.
I didn’t expect to fall this hard for Marathon. I was one of numerous voices lamenting the fact that Bungie hitched the game’s amazing art direction and worldbuilding to a PVP-centric multiplayer shooter instead of a single-player campaign. An extraction shooter wasn’t how I imagined spending my limited gaming time (three kids, full-time job, a house where something breaks every other week).
But Marathon isn’t really an extraction shooter. It’s actually, deep-down, an action roguelike. I’m not the first to uncover this secret identity. User LeftAtLondon spelled it out over the weekend on X. While on the surface Marathon feels like a mini-battle royale in which players compete over rare salvage, it effectively plays just like a roguelike where one of the threats you face just happens to be the occasional squad of opposing players.
The game is run-based. There’s also a lot of procedural RNG when it comes to where you end up on a map, what events occur, and the loot you find along the way. And like the best roguelikes, losing is both disappointing and liberating. While you can permanently lose your gear in Marathon, the gear is only ever a means to an end.
It’s like getting a great streak of boons in Hades 2 and then stumbling on a boss fight. Your build is lost but it’s now just an opportunity to find and leverage another. The sooner you realize that all of your gear will eventually be lost, the easier it is to let go and embrace the possibilities ahead of you.
This might be part of why Marathon has captured my attention like no other game since last year’s Elden Ring Nightreign. FromSoftware’s spin-off also felt like a missed opportunity to some fans. Instead of more single-player Elden Ring content, players were getting a very messy-sounding multiplayer genre hybrid. But it turned out to be an unexpectedly perfect combination.
Every encounter was high-stakes and the world was a confusing enigma but then suddenly it was 100 hours later you and your friends had learned it like the back of your hand. What seemed like a mess of haphazard design ideas thrown into a blender revealed itself to be a potent cocktail that pushed the multiplayer genre forward. Nightreign had the sauce. So does Marathon.
Like the former, the game works best when you’re navigating it with a tight-knit group of mutuals. That’s a tall order for most players, and nothing about Marathon goes out of its way to be clear, obvious, or welcoming to newcomers. But if the hook doesn’t miss, it goes in deep and you find yourself making Metroidvania-like maps on scrap paper of key resource spawns and optimal rotation strategies while trading Marathon memes in the group chat.
And I’ve barely touched Outpost yet, where the game’s friction and esoteric, learn-as-you play mechanics ramp up substantially. I don’t know if the magic can hold over the long term, but 15 hours in Marathon has already elbowed its way into my busy schedule and solidified itself as one of those games whose magic I’ll miss once it’s gone.
